Tag Archives: the association factor

Music that Escapes

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A walker’s personal space is about four feet. But a motorcyclist with a radio blasting has usually claimed most of a city block for himself.

The noise of music blasting from speakers in an open window usually ends at a college dormitory when the beer runs out. If we are lucky the same habit is not a part of an older neighbor’s routine. Music in public can be a wonderful thing, but it needs to be curated through known channels and with the blessing of the neighborhood or municipality where it will be heard.

Cases range from the alarming to the delightful. A ride on a bus or train is no guarantee that calm will prevail. There are riders who listen on headphones that leak thin and brittle noises into the space. Worse yet, a rider’s noisy boom box on the subway or city bus shows is its own weird kind of narcissism. The assumption that one’s own “entertainment” is OK for everyone ignores the diversity that exists in personal musical tastes.

In the 1930s some German towns were filled with the Nazi Party’s recorded “patriotic” music blaring from speakers tied to utility poles. Music then was simply politics through other means. Less fearsome is Disney’s habit of putting music into its outdoor park spaces in an area where there are particular movie tie-ins. The music soundtrack is essentially a scene-setting experience for what follows. As with all “escaped music,” there is really no option to avoid exposure other than sequestering oneself inside.

This inability to avoid music not intended for you is also seen near outdoor theaters. For example, there are nearly 5000 homes within earshot of the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. But the site is a cultural favorite in the city. Most residents have made peace with the sounds that drift outside the valley it sits in. And some love the sound “spillage.” That’s less the case in Queens New York with concerts at the Forest Hills Stadium, which used to be the site of the U.S. Open.  At the opposite end of the scale is an offer of made in Sweden to provide free cabins in the woods for anyone who will keep their noise levels down to 45 dB (the level of a quiet conversation).

On a very different scale, my own town’s “porch concerts” are a delight. Maybe 11 or 12 groups might be playing when residents of my community of 4000 are ready to stroll down some neighboring streets to hear both the accidentally microtonal efforts of a garage band as well as real talent worth hearing. And then there are funny anomalies from all over. In Australia, some convenience stores placed speakers in their parking lots to drive away young loiterers. It’s the young listener’s loss that they will not hang around to hear the baroque music. But, of course, that’s the point.

My  town also shares one of its main streets with a “scenic highway” passing through and out into the woods and fields along the upper Delaware River. The road and a parallel canal path are nice escapes. It also helps that the pedestrian-heavy town is careful to create walkways everywhere. But the problem of overwhelming noise also comes into focus there. In the summer, any number of motorcyclists use the route to escape the less pleasant roads of nearby cities. That’s their right. But a minority have found some demon retailers who has figured out that listening to audio should not be limited to an enclosed  a car. Bikers with stereos blasting are annoying—perhaps a vestige of some Easy Rider fantasy. A motorcycle is usually and often intentionally loud. Google estimates a Triumph Daytona rises to 107.2 dB when accelerating, about 20 dB louder than it is safe to be around. Add on speakers and fellow riders, and you might as well be standing on an airport runway rather than a city sidewalk. It all amounts to a passing noise parade forced on anyone with a working set of ears and two good feet.

A walker’s personal space is about four feet. A biker with a radio blasting has usually claimed most of  a city block for himself. Am I showing my age to be amazed at the lack of shame? I suppose men should be ready to argue about the size of their amplifiers. But I sometimes wonder if these folks may be defeated by life, inadvertently using their equipment as a pathetic stab for attention from others. Interestingly, a Reddit discussion of riding with music varies. Some bikers like “the music blasting.” Others note that they want “a peaceful ride” through the countryside. None I could find expressed any concern about intruding on anyone else’s space.

Media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz notes that our interest in some types of media create what he calls “the association factor,” meaning that others may find significance in media we have picked out to be seen or heard by others. We may not associate with a television commercial, but a person carrying a specific book or listening to music in a public place has assumed the burden of signaling who they are, at least slightly. If I carry around a hard copy of Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, it is a fair assumption that others will assume I’m interested in the author’s crime story. So it is with music that we carry with us that escapes. However indirectly, the association factor represents a marker about our character.

As an avid music listener I would like to be buried with my Walkman. But I will concede that the muffled sounds of music coming from a new grave might empty out a cemetery.

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Subverted Experiences

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     A fake Renoir owned by Donald Trump

Anyone can hang a version of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in their home or view it online.  But seeing the original fulfills the desire for a pilgrimage. 

What does it mean for a painting or a musical piece to be endlessly replicated and copied? Is a good reproduction of the Mona Lisa still a Mona Lisa?  Is a march by John Phillips Sousa captured on old Victor acoustic recordings that he hated still a Sousa march? And what does it say about our sensibilities that a lot of people on the rim of the Grand Canyon seem to be preoccupied with a digital device rather than the glorious and unmediated view?

Budding critics and art scholars are usually required to take a look at Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 piece, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He addresses the question of how we should treat a copy of an original at a point in time when copies of everything are mostly what we know.  Benjamin claims an original has an “aura” that a  reproduction cannot match.  And  yet, as the recent BBC/Netflix series Fake or Fortune makes clear, it may require the precision of an electron microscope to tell the difference between a Renoir and a good fake. We see millions of paintings done in the style of French master.  If we love the style, why not love them all, regardless of their pedigrees?

To say the least, our relationship with an original in its own place is peculiar and unstable.  Anyone trying to actually see the Mona Lisa in Paris or Vincent van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night in New York is likely to experience the same kind of crowding that happens on a subway platform. The mob scenes in the galleries often block a clear view of a painting, mostly because of a forest of cameras held high to catch the moment.  What brings these crowds out?  Is the real thing that much better than a good print?  Do the hordes expect some sort of transference-by-proximity?

It’s usually the case that a photo of a painting or a bootleg of a concert will be a degraded form of the original. But I suspect the expectation of seeing more in the original is usually not the point. A better explanation is fundamentally social: tied to being in the presence of a recognized icon, even when the actual experience is surely a long way from what the artist envisioned as an ideal viewing experience.  Indeed, the fact that there are so many copies of a cultural artifact surely increases the impetus to find the original.

 

Being in the space of the original is what functions as a kind of secular pilgrimage.

My theory: as individuals, we occasionally need just one degree of separation rather than six.  We need to be at the scene of what everyone else celebrates second hand.  And we need to take home some evidence that we were there. Anyone can hang a version of the Mona Lisa in their home or view it online. But being in the space of the original is what functions as a kind of secular pilgrimage. Somehow our status as an occupant of the planet is formally affirmed.  Our own Hajj can lay claim to the association factor that comes with being in the same place.

None of us are immune to this pull.  Ask anyone what they have put on their personal ‘bucket list,’ and you are bound to hear about places that are crowded with people on their own pilgrimages. These might include throngs of tourists in Times Square, the daily homages paid to any number of pieces of art sitting in a city’s premier museum, or even a tour of the Warner Brothers back lot. We seek the aura that Benjamin suggests, even though the circumstances of our attendance usually end up sabotaging what is or was so sublime about the original.

     Midwest Street, the Warner Brothers Back Lot

For example, in Burbank we can still visit outdoor sets used in the shows The Music Man, Gilmore Girls and La La Land.  But with film, the fakes are actually the sets, which are used along with a number of  photographic “cheats” to make them look authentic. With film, the real thing is what actually ends up on a screen out in Duluth or Denver.

Of course being ‘in the scene’ says little about understanding what makes a work a masterpiece. For that we need the practiced eye of a dedicated appreciator, and maybe a sense of the consciousness an artist originally experienced.  All may be more easily captured away from the crowds and planted in front of a good facsimile. But of course this deprives us of the social act of visiting our own version of Mecca.